Brett King

Brett King - Moven

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Movenbank yields to pressure and opens their first branch

01 April 2012 | 6851 views | 0

In response to the strong demand for us to compete with the main street branch players, our recent efforts at crowdsourcing our business model has led us to investigate a revolutionary new form of branch for the US and UK markets. The new branches which
we at Movenbank simply call ‘the space’ is designed to give our rapidly growing customer base the comfort of a branch environment, without many of the overheads of a traditional branch.

Cashless

As we’ve stated from the outset of our initial brand launch, we’re great believers in the capability of the cardless mobile platform for day to day banking activity. While cash is still used in old, small town convenience stores in the outer reaches of the
developed world, we prefer to actively encourage a much more eco-friendly approach to payments and money exchange.

“Cash worked fine in the 9th Century AD, but today paper bills are an eco-disaster, carry disease and are used with increased frequency for taking drugs like cocaine. Clearly cash is a menace to society and our branches are making a clear statement that
the good of mankind would be best served by having no cash at all”, said Brett King the founder of Movenbank at the opening of our new concept space in New York today.

Recent studies show that 11% of bank notes in the UK and
75% of notes in the Los Angeles area carry traces of Cocaine use. Clearly, no bank with any scruples can continue to support such activities, and must make a clear moral stand.

“The cost of supporting cash is significant to traditional banks, so we’ve also eliminated that to keep our distribution costs as low as possible so that we can pass on those savings to our dedicated customers.” King went on to say.

Teller-less

We at Movenbank recognize that some of the older, less technology savvy generation require the psychological crutch of a physical space to feel like our bank is ‘real’, as if a building somehow makes you a more competent banking platform for service delivery.
While this psychology may give some comfort, the reality is no one actually visits a branch anymore to transact, as modern people simply don’t use cash or cheques anymore in daily life. Quantipulation statistics show that mostly criminals, drug lords, money
launderers and illegal workers still prefer hard currency, so we removed the temptation for this segment of the population from thinking that our space is a place where they can indulge their outdated fantasies by simply removing the antique teller function
all together.

Here’s what Scott Bales, our Chief Mobile Officer had to say about these positive changes:

“We believe that the teller function is simply a security blanket for most of these legacy customers, who also tend to be on the less desirable side of society, at least economically from a retail banking perspective. Clearly most educated people have not
walked into a branch for a teller-based transaction for the good part of a decade, so why take on this cost when we’d just have to raise our fees to support the wrong customer segment. The mobile phone is clearly where banking is at, but we’d like to integrate
the mobile back into the branch space in a way that is uniquely Movenbank.”

The ‘space’

Movenbank’s revolutionary new ‘space’ is designed by the award winning design artist Yi Ying Liu Qi of Turtle Design in Paris. Yi Ying designed a radical, open, clean environment where customers could walk past and see the brand for that ‘comfort’ of brick
and mortar substance, or could come in and meditate about how banking is changing for the better.

The yoga mats within the Movenbank space incorporate the ability to plug in the soon-to-be-released NFC-enabled iPhone 5 for listening to your playlist, while synced to specifically designed Movenbank visualizations that appear on the digital walls all around
you. We’ve enabled an intelligent neural net that combines the different playlists of different customers to create a virtual living art form within our space as participation grows.

Rather than supply coffee machines as some of our competitors have, we have blended organic wheat grass bars where you can mix fresh fruit and vegetables with our 100% organic, whole leaf wheat grass. For those that prefer a hot beverage, we’ve gone with
iced green tea and boiled osmosis water with a hint of citrus.

We’ve done away with chairs and benches entirely in the Movenbank space to give an air of light airiness and freedom – freedom from the old ways of banking and retail interactions.

Come and see us

So if you are ready for the next generation of the banking space, come and visit our new branch opened right in the center of Central Park in New York. You’ll see we’ve adopted the glass Kabah approach of the 5th Avenue Apple store, but added a blue-sky
tinge to the glass, with a specially crafted aqua-green plush pile carpet to lower environmental impact within the park.

The first 100 customers to visit today will get a special April 1st commemorative Movenbank debit card collectors item. The card is purely commemorative and can’t actually be used for transactions anywhere

Brett's profile

Brett King is an Amazon bestselling author, a global commentator on the financial services space, a keynote speaker, the host of the BREAKING BANKS Radio Show on Voice America Radio, and the founder o...